arXiv AI

Layer-wise Curriculum Learning for Efficient LLM Compression

The paper proposes a layer-wise curriculum learning strategy for compressing large language models (LLMs). By partitioning the model into layer segments and starting training with easier tasks before progressing to harder ones, the method accelerates convergence and stabilizes knowledge transfer from teacher to student models. Additional techniques such as feature caching with multi-threading improve GPU utilization, leading to state‑of‑the‑art compression results and over 50% reductions in memory usage and training time on BERT and GPT‑2, while outperforming other pruning methods on LLaMA‑family and Qwen models.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

Efficient Knowledge Distillation for LLMs: Offline Top-K Logits and a Fused Chunked KL Loss

arXiv:2608. 03796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models are often the only option for deployment under tight latency, cost, and on-premises constraints, but they are rarely trained from scratch: a compressed model is usually recovered through knowledge distillation (KD).

By Bakbergen Ryskulov, Iker Garc\'ia-Ferrero, David Montero, David Jansen, Ali Hashemi, Jezabel R. Garcia, Antonio Tiene, Rom\'an Or\'us
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

MILO: Efficient Many-shot In-Context Learning with Block-wise Low-rank Compression

MILO is a compression framework that reduces the key-value cache memory used in many-shot in-context learning by applying block-wise low-rank compression. It dynamically allocates rank budgets to blocks based on information entropy, preserving important information while aggressively compressing redundant parts. Experiments on Qwen2.5 models show up to a 50% reduction in KV cache memory and a 1.8× throughput improvement with negligible performance loss on classification and reasoning tasks.

By Youpeng Zhao, Tian Tan, Liqian Peng, Jun Wang, Alec Go
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Communication-Efficient LLM Adaptation over Decentralized GPU Meshes

The paper introduces a communication‑efficient method for adapting large language models on decentralized GPU meshes. It proposes an asynchronous two‑circuit system that uses fast compressed training with activation masking for pipeline‑parallel transfer and compressed data‑parallel synchronization, while a slower anchor circuit performs occasional unmasked passes. A spectral correction optimizer then denoises the masked gradients using these anchor priors, enabling high compression rates and achieving up to 40× throughput gains over internet‑grade connections while matching dense uncompressed performance.

By Sameera Ramasinghe, Shamane Siriwardhana, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Hadi Mohaghegh Dolatabadi, Chamin P Hewa Koneputugodage, Gil Avraham, Violetta Shevchenko, James Snewin, Karol Pajak, Harry Xi, Alexander Long
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Pruning Laws for Large Language Models

arXiv:2504.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling up model parameters and training data consistently improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of rapidly gro...

By Ayan Sengupta, Siddhant Chaudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty